Trilogy Systems

Trilogy was the most well-funded start-up company up till that point in Silicon Valley history.

Much of this was due to his collaboration with Fujitsu, who used their own semiconductor fabrication lines to produce the emitter-coupled logic (ECL) transistors in chip form at scales that had not been accomplished before.

This made the resulting system smaller and cheaper and able to run at faster clock speeds.

However, doing so increased the number of boards, to the point where inter-board delays made timing constraints very difficult to achieve.

Instead of making many small boards and wiring them together inside the computer, they would all be printed on a single wafer which would carry the connections patterned using the same process.

As with other WSI projects, Trilogy's chip design relied on redundancy, that is replication of functional units.

If one unit was not fabricated properly, it would be switched out through on-chip wiring and another correctly functioning copy would be used.

These included vertical stacking of computer chips and chip-to-chip interconnect technology that used copper conductors and polyimide insulation that allowed for extremely dense packing of signal wiring.

The chip interconnect technology could not be reliably manufactured as the layers tended to delaminate and there was no automated way to repair soldering errors.

The only major customer was Digital Equipment, which paid $10 million for the rights to the interconnect and cooling technologies.